Read Online A Change of Skin by Carlos Fuentes - Free Book Online Page B

Javier.
    *   *   *
    Î”   Dragoness, just look at the day we are living in. Here you have it in the paper. Dated Pittman, Nevada. Crime of passion in which the weapon was a two-motored Cessna. Three victims who were inside a bar, while the target of the deed was untouched. John Covarrubias (hey, a compatriot!), thirty-eight years of age (more, a contemporary!), had a violent argument with his wife in a bar during the afternoon. In Pittman, Nevada. He wanted to effect a reconciliation and have her return to live with him, and when she refused, he became blind with fury and went and got his Cessna, flew over the town and dived at the bar. Missed. Destroyed two cars in the street, swiped the bar and injured three of its seated clients, and angry Mr. Covarrubias was killed but his good wife, who had just walked off down the street, was merely shocked and survived to live happily, we may suppose, ever after. And so it goes, sweet Elizabeth. Once you begin to monologue over the skull of Yorick you discover that the Dane’s doubt is the only way to affirm the elemental truth that we are, yet we are not; we were, yet we were not; we shall be, yet we shall not be. Now you see me, now you don’t: boo. That is: there is a state of nonbeing that summons us continually whether we are feeling terror or laughter or insanity. And we like to play games with it, but who knows, suddenly we may be only playing our role in earnest, our eternally present and eternally denied possibility of nothingness. Well, not everyone takes that step. The risks are too great. The devil takes you, or your name is Rimbaud. Which makes me ache with boredom, Elizabeth. And to return to you and yours, if we are ever going to know who Javier is and why he is, we must go back and remember and let him go back and remember. There is no other way, however tiring you find it as you sit in the rocker in your damp-smelling hotel room in Cholula and say to him: “You’re exhausted, Javier. So much talk always wears you out. Why don’t you lie down?”
    Your husband pays you no attention. He unzips his little leather bag and one by one places his bottles and vials on the narrow glass shelf held by two nails above the washbasin in the bathroom. He sees himself in the mirror there and in a low voice asks, “Don’t you want to unpack your things?”
    â€œWhat? I can’t hear you.”
    â€œI asked if you don’t want … oh, nothing.”
    He places his shaving mug on the shelf, lifting it by its handle, and then puts the white-bristled brush within it, the silvery straight razor flat beside it.
    â€œLigeia, listen. The party was just about over…”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWorn down, tired, nearing its end, though the moment had come, as it comes to all parties, when those still present could believe that it had never begun and would never end. But to a newcomer just arriving, to me as I arrived, it was clear that the party was almost over.”
    He stands in the door of the bathroom looking at you and you say wearily: “Please, Javier, please. I know that old story. We both know it. It’s past, done for, a closed chapter. Please don’t go through it again.”
    â€œThey greeted me with a certain coldness precisely for that reason, because I knew that it was over and they didn’t want to know.” He goes back into the bathroom and continues talking while he takes out bottles and places them in a row: the cologne—Jean-Marie Farina; the eyedrops; the Alka-Seltzer. Then his manicure tweezers and the bottle of Vitamin C tablets. The capsules of Desenfriol. “Yet they pretended gaiety, to be receiving me as a kind of prodigal son, the latecomer who could be forgiven because his arrival gave an excuse to go on, put on another record, look for an unopened bottle. But after a few brief and intoxicated words they abandoned me. Left me to my own devices and I